Robin’s Story 2: If You Had Two Years to Live Would You Keep That Job?

 

*This is Part 2. If you haven’t read “Why I Chose The RV Life”, please scroll down. Thanks!

 

I was sitting at a bar when I got the news. “They found some spots on my pancreas,” my sister said into the phone, “and a few more on my liver.”

I asked what it meant, but I already knew: it was cancer.

My sister’s name was Teri. She was 47 and lived in Connecticut, working a job she absolutely hated. I mean HATED. Her boss was a dick, she worked constantly, and her health deteriorated as she sat behind a desk 75% of the day. She clung steadfast to her escape plan: get her Master’s Degree and bolt. Once she had the right education, she could call the shots; she would be in control.

The week she graduated, she began to get a strange pain in her side. The doctors called it stress; they called it diet. They told her she had diabetes. Unfortunately, the diabetes was caused because a tumor was stopping insulin from leaving her pancreas. She had six months — a year if treatment went well.

I went to Connecticut and packed up her house then drove her car across country so she would have it in Colorado, where she flew to be closer to our parents. The more the miles built up in the rear-view mirror, the more the panic bubbled into my throat. My sister and I had not been close. We argued frequently, our love strained by a rivalry I think neither of us could understand. We worked in the same industry, and colleagues compared us constantly. Being competitive, we took to the challenge, each always trying to out-perform the other, and the competition was fierce.

I took a wrong turn and ended up in Manhattan, distracted by disbelief. How could this happen to someone like Teri? Her corporate nickname was “The Bulldog” and she had certainly earned it. She was a force. Unstoppable. The kind of person who would beat cancer like a bell.

As I drove, I convinced myself we would fight this together. She would live; those stupid, ugly odds applied to other people –not her. Hell, she was already making plans to do all the things she always wanted … as soon as the cancer treatment was over. Visit New Orleans, learn to fly a helicopter, find a new job! Teri was a fighter; if anyone could beat pancreatic cancer, she could. At least, that’s what I thought until I pulled up and saw her sitting on the porch.

Her hoodie hung from her long limbs and I could see the knob of her knees poking through the thin, flowered pajama bottoms she wore. I threw the car in park and tried to swallow. She was the color of a green apple. I ran up the steps to hug her, not knowing how a human person could sustain that shade. Something vile had seeped beneath her skin and taken hold. She smiled, shrugged, and then began to cry.

I spent the last six weeks of 2015 caring for her in a two-bedroom apartment she had rented nearby our parents in Colorado Springs. We worked in shifts, giving her medicines on a schedule and emptying her bags and calling hospice to increase the morphine when it wasn’t enough. She smoked cigarettes and each time said, “what? It’s not like they’ll give me cancer, right?” then she’d laugh, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe she was stuck and waiting to die.

As the pain intensified, Teri worried about everyone else. She was the bravest person I’ve ever known. We went over her final bills, planned her funeral, and talked through her final wishes. Then one afternoon, she gave me the kind of steady, discomforting gaze only she could, and asked the question that would change my life.

“Do you like your job?” She asked.

I shrugged. “Yeah, I like it.”

She nodded and crossed her arms, taking a deep breath before looking up at me again. “If you knew you were going to die in two years, would you keep that job?”

The word “no” flew from my mouth and landed between us like a brick, followed by a silence that settled into the bed sheets. Teri was two years older than I, and I knew what she was asking: If cancer took me in two years, would I have regrets? Of course, I would. I’m sure the look on my face said as much.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve always imagined you in Paris with a sketchbook. Let’s watch House Hunters International. I recorded some for you.”

Wonderful, Teri. That was all it took. It was like she had jerked open a curtain and let the light in. Life isn’t promised, no matter how much we wish it were.  The only way to know we will live our dreams is to actually live them. Now.

Everyone said not to make major life decisions that soon after a tragedy. I think Teri would have said, “fuck that noise,” and I do too. The answer was already in front of me — the RV Life. That was the way. Six months after she passed, I took the leap and quit.

If I only had two years, by God I was going to spend it living my dream.

To see the YouTube Video where I talk about this, click here!

I sold my condo, pocketed the proceeds and drove to Colorado. I rented an apartment and holed up to write my first novel, Chasing Kate, then my second, Loving Lindsey. I became RV research-obsessed. I planned, budgeted and took a part-time job to pay the rent, until I could hit the road. As my second book was released, bought my rig, left my sticks and bricks apartment and leapt fully into my amazing new life.

I don’t have all the answers, and I certainly don’t have the answers for you. What I can tell you is that this is a solution that is working for me. My expenses are low, but so is my income (read more in the upcoming post: My RV Budget: Real Talk (or subscribe to this blog  to have it emailed directly to you). I left the corporate stressors for a whole new world of RV stressors (more to come on that, in the post: A Flashlight Fell on My Toe, and I Love It). But the world has opened up for me in the most miraculous and unexpected ways. I won’t be swimming in that corporate cash and shwag anymore, but the blinders are off and my creative mind is on fire. If you want, you can do it too. Life is full of options.

Thank you for reading! And, let’s help other people discover everything the RV life offers by Sharing, Liking and Subscribing.

Be Happy. Create More. Set Yourself Free .

Robin

CreativityRV

Creativity RV is on YouTube! Click here to visit the channel. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE!

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